There is a need for new and effective antibacterial agents, antibacterial agents that can be used for therapeutic applications.
Antibiotic resistance is a phenomenon that is becoming increasingly difficult to address. The recent emergence and spread of NDM-1 (New Delhi metallo-β-lactamase-1) producing bacteria, resistant to many groups of antibiotics including the powerful β-lactams (e.g. carbapenems), has led to infection spreading across many countries. The global panic has again fueled the urgent need to discover novel bactericidal agents for therapeutic purposes.
Antimicrobial peptides (AMPs) are the evolutionarily conserved effectors in innate immunity. Their broad-spectral bactericidal activity, rapid killing rate, and the distinctive mode of action (i.e. targeting the bacterial cell membrane itself rather than specific receptors such as proteins and DNA), have made them promising candidates for the development of alternative agents to cope with the widespread challenges of bacterial resistance. However, although over 1000 AMPs have been isolated and characterized from different sources, only limited success has so far been achieved in clinical trials. The major barriers for converting the peptides into drugs lie in the high cost of production on a large scale, toxicity to host cells, and susceptibility to proteolytic degradation. Furthermore, concerns have recently emerged from the clinical use of AMPs with sequences that are too close to those of natural human AMPs, relating to the inevitable compromise of human natural defense, thereby imposing possible threats to public health.
Accordingly there remains a need for new, and effective antimicrobial agents, that are clinically useful.
In addition, there is also a need for effective and inexpensive antibacterial agents that can be used either as preservatives or antibacterial agents in personal care compositions (such as antibacterial creams, ointments, lotions, shampoos, hand washes, mouthwashes, toothpastes etc.). Many preservatives and antibacterial agents used are synthetic chemicals that suffer from poor biocompatibility.
It is an objective of the present invention to provide a range of antibacterial amphiphilic peptides that are of use as personal care products and as potential therapeutic agents.